"Hold on a minute." Sure, there'd been women in and out of his life. He wasn't a priest. Besides, he liked women.
"Darling, relax." She patted his thigh. "We're both adults. You said you wanted to hear this, so for godsake listen. His name was Jerry Ackerman and . . . it started back about nine months ago. Since he was new, he'd drop by my office now and then. You know, to learn the ropes."
"What kind of ropes, exactly?"
"Really, Michael. Anyway, he wasn't exactly world class in the boudoir, if that makes you feel any better. Though needless to say I never told him that. Our little scene tonight would have blown his Brooklyn mind. Now does that preserve your precious male ego? He was just nice, and interesting."
"Was?"
"I'll get to that." She was tracing small circles on the alabaster. "Week before last he dropped off a computer disk at my office. Said he couldn't figure it out. And it was old, maybe two weeks. Which was unusual, especially for satellite intercepts, which this was. Normally we get them the same day. So I ran it through my desk station, figuring it couldn't be that big a deal." She paused nervously, then went on. "Well, the first part was encoded using one of the standard Soviet encryption systems we've had cracked for years, and it had a lot of proper names. But the rest of it was just a string of numbers. No matter what I tried, I got nothing but garbage."
"Really? I thought Fort Meade's football field of Cray supercomputers could crack anything."
"I thought so too. But this encryption was either so clever, or so simple, nothing seemed to click. I couldn't do it. I even began to wonder, maybe it's not a cipher at all. Maybe it's just some obscure foreign language. So I matrixed it against some we have in the data base. And, love, we've got them. A zillion megabytes of memory. Serbo-Croatian, Urdu, Basque . . ." She drew on her cigarette, sending a glow into the dark. Above them the rain continued to pound. "But I still couldn't find anything that would crack it."
"Doesn't sound like you." He drew her around and kissed her. "Half the time you're too smart for your own good."
"Apparently not smart enough." She hugged him back automatically, then continued. "When I told Jerry I couldn't break the encryption, he suddenly got very nervous. Said okay, then he'd just take it and try again himself. So I asked him to sign it out on my log. Just routine. And that's when he started acting strange. At first he refused, but finally he did it when I said, 'It's like this, sweet buns. No tickee, no washee.' By then he'd stopped coming over to my place and things had gotten a little strained at the edges, to put it mildly. So I didn't think too much about it at the time."